Oracle Blog

Thoughts, news, tips on all things process

Thursday Feb 21, 2013

Business Process Management (BPM) and data management have been attached at the hip for eons. A sound BPM solution cannot succeed without guaranteed and secure data management. And converting data to actionable insight requires human interaction and automation. BPM is what makes data meaningful.

Data has been scrutinized more in recent times than ever before. Big Data and Fast Data are two relatively new terms which have gained significance due to the unprecedented volume of information being generated in recent times. When you look under the covers, both are two ends of the same stick, one side static: somewhat more accepting of delayed reaction and the other very dynamic: requiring reactions on the fly.

Big Data is massive volumes of varied data collected in repositories and analysed for trends such as in data mining and predictive analysis. Business process improvements can be advocated in the organization based on the trend analysis of Big Data. For example, with Big Data and BPM, a retailer can discover how demand increases for specific products at specific periods of time, combine that with social media responses to understand customer preferences, and match that need in the future by appropriate inventory management. This gives the ability to look in the rear-view mirror and make predictions based on history.

Fast Data on the other hand is large volumes of varied data arriving at very high velocity that requires contextual processing in real-time. In most cases, the data becomes meaningless as it ages. BPM brings the facet of adding human interaction and process improvement, making the business process highly dynamic and the data meaningful. For example, a large mobile operator has millions of subscribers and handles tens of thousands of SMS messages per second. Fast Data gives the provider the ability to identify and predict trends based on real-time subscriber events from mobile devices. A reaction to this insight could be suggesting targeted services and location based offerings to the mobile subscribers. Adding BPM to Fast Data would give the mobile operator the ability to make business process improvements to support the trends generated on the fly. Rather than simply study a bottleneck or an opportunity, the operator could actually deploy more resources where needed and capitalize. In addition, cases can be opened to handle any eventualities that require human interaction. And lastly, with BPM in place, the operator could take one step further and analyze if the business process improvement actually made a difference to the operations in real-time. This is like driving with your eyes on the road, making judgement calls to drive optimal and improving your driving skills, all together, in real-time.

An upcoming Oracle Webcast, “Fast Data—Turning High Velocity Data Into Value", will focus on the emerging topic of fast data and the products, solutions, and services Oracle offers to help your organization implement a fast data strategy.